Tag Archive: Wayward Pines

The movie-going world first met Anna Paquin when she co-starred in Jane Campion’s The Piano, which earned her the Academy Award for her supporting role at age 11–the second youngest Oscar winner in history. As the New Zealand actress gained experience in her craft she went on to star in True Blood, which earned her a Golden Globe Award. These days she’s best known as Rogue in the X-Men series, appearing in four X-Men movies so far. This past fall she starred as a murder victim in Netflix’s 19th century historical drama series Alias Grace, and this month U.S. audiences were introduced to her performance as a cop in one of the better episodes of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. This week she returns to television in a starring role again as a cop in the new series Bellevue on WGN America.

Paquin continues to show her Oscar and Golden Globe wins were deserved. The actor has a command of the stage, and consistently her presence in a scene brings authority to her characters. In Bellevue we meet a down-to-Earth side of Paquin as she plays Detective Annie Ryder, a local institution in her small town, whose brash personality and working class roots put her at odds with other officers in her department and every other faction in the town of Bellevue. Her new case is locating a missing young man, a local hockey player and celebrity of sorts who we learn had a transgendered lifestyle and possibly was being counseled by a priest at a local church. Paquin’s Ryder has her own odd sense of humor as she makes the best of handling a daughter, a sad sack ex-husband, and the residents of a mining town with a newly closed mine and a newly opened brewery. The first episode really kicks in as we watch Ryder find a connection between the recent crime and strange messages left to her after her father’s suicide when she was a child.

You can see bits and pieces of a myriad of dark-murder-mystery genre TV and film in Bellevue, everything from the dark creepy vibe of Haven, Grimm, Twin Peaks, The Returned,The X-Files, and Wayward Pines–minus the supernatural elements–along with the serious crime material of Broadchurch, Fargo, and Thirteen. As for its pacing, this Canada production for WGN America is presented like many British mystery series–there seems to be more time spent in study of each scene, as found in better mysteries like Shetland or Hinterlands. One episode in and it already is more compelling than The Killing. For current audiences Bellevue may feel more like Riverdale–the series pilot even has Ryder’s daughter recounting a past murder in the small town as Jughead often narrates in Riverdale.

Westworld was writer/director Michael Crichton’s original high-tech vacation theme park-turned disaster blockbuster film, from 1973. Twenty years before Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs went on a murderous rampage, it was a sideshow automaton from the Old West pavilion that turned on the tourists. We showed you the first teaser trailer for the new series Westworld (discussed here at borg.com) and now we have a fuller look at the newest incarnation of borgs Hollywood has created for us in HBO’s latest trailer for the series.

Jonathan Nolan, brother of The Dark Knight series’ Christopher Nolan, is directing the return of the sci-fi classic, also the latest J.J. Abrams production. The original Westworld starred Yul Brynner as the cool and unflinching Gunslinger, with Richard Benjamin running for his life, along with appearances by James Brolin and Majel Barrett. The new series stars a great, comparable actor to Brynner as the Gunslinger–Ed Harris, as well as Anthony Hopkins in a role like Richard Attenborough’s mastermind in Jurassic Park, plus a host of genre actors: X-Men’s James Marsden, Jimmi Simpson (Psych, House of Cards, Zodiac), Thandie Newton (Mission: Impossible II, The Chronicles of Riddick), Ingrid Bolsø Berdal (Hercules, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters),Star Trek’s Clifton Collins, Jr., Veronica Mars’ Tessa Thompson, Prince Caspian’s Ben Barnes, and James Bond’s Jeffrey Wright.

But it’s Evan Rachel Wood’s character Delores who takes center stage in this trailer–and hopefully the entire series, which looks to hone in on what it takes to be human. It’s a theme we love to see in the best borg shows, from the mind of Philip K. Dick in Blade Runner to Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Data to Terminator Genisys, and the BBC series Humans last year. We ask the question all the time here. Are the creations in the new Westworld just updated automatons? Merely androids? Or will the biological meet high-tech to give us something else?

Known for one of the most bizarre characters ever played by actor Yul Brynner, 1973’s Westworld was writer/director Michael Crichton’s original theme park-turned disaster. Twenty years before Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs went on a murderous rampage, it was sideshow automatons from a high-tech vacation spot that turned on the tourists. Now we have a fuller look at the revival series with a preview released this week by HBO for its new Westworld series.

Jonathan Nolan, brother of The Dark Knight series’ Christopher Nolan, is directing the return of the sci-fi classic. The original starred Brynner as the cool and unflinching Gunslinger, with Richard Benjamin running for his life, along with appearances by James Brolin and Majel Barrett. The new series stars a great, comparable actor to Brynner–Ed Harris, as well as Anthony Hopkins, James Marsden, Jimmi Simpson, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal,Star Trek’s Clifton Collins, Jr., and James Bond’s Jeffrey Wright.

The new trailer creates a world that feels very much like the trapped, askew community in Wayward Pines, and unlike the original film the series delves into what it’s like to be an android or borg as was so nicely handled in the series Humans.

Chances are you skipped 10 Cloverfield Lane when it hit theaters this March 11. It was one of those movies with a cryptic trailer. In a world where trailers typically give too much away, this one left you thinking John Goodman was some kind of rescuer of two others in a dystopian underground quonset hut. But once you’ve seen it, you realize you were better off not having an explanation. Why? Spoilers.10 Cloverfield Lane is now available on Blu-ray, pay cable and streaming services.

It’s the ultimate horror story. A woman, played by fan favorite Mary Elizabeth Winstead in a smart and resourceful role, wrecks her car and awakens tied to a post in an underground bunker with two men. The older man, played expertly by John Goodman in a performance that would have garnered him an Oscar nod a decade ago (think Kathy Bates in Misery), claims that the outside world is gone, victim to a chemical attack. Maybe it’s the Russians. Maybe it’s aliens. Maybe he’s a psycho. Or maybe its zombies. But we know the movie has the word Cloverfield in the title and is produced by J.J. Abrams, so what’s really going on here? Does it have anything at all to do with J.J. Abrams’s 2008 monster movie Cloverfield or not? Is there some sci-fi element lurking around the next corner? Or is it just a street address, much like Abrams includes the name Kelvin in all his movies?

All will be revealed in time.

10 Cloverfield Lane is an expertly paced mystery, plunging you into the question “what genre is this movie?” It’s that question that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last scene. Fans of M. Night Shyamalan movies will fit right in here, and at times you get the feeling that Shyamalan is somewhere behind the scenes. When is the revelation coming? Who is telling the truth?

A new TV series is coming to USA Network this Fall that looks very similar to the claustrophobic, post-apocalypse Wayward Pines, but without all the Pacific Northwest charm. Colony, previewed last weekend at San Diego Comic-Con is a look at a family trying to escape from Los Angeles when the future of America goes bad.

Call it dystopian, call it post-apocalyptic, it also looks to pull from past science fiction themes found in Alien Nation, Haven, Red Dawn, Wicker Man, and Under the Dome. Oh, yeah, and Lost. And speaking of Lost, the draw for many will be star Josh Holloway, known for his role as Sawyer on Lost and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Another actor co-starring in Colony is The Lost Room and House, M.D.’s Peter Jacobson, who looks particularly good as the apparent puppetmaster of the show.

“We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.” —The Animals

Claustrophobic? Then maybe the new Fox series Wayward Pines is not for you. But the previews for the new series make us think you might be miss out on something good.

Wrong place, wrong time. We’ve all encountered circumstances we wish we could reverse, but most of us haven’t stumbled into an entire town we wished we could escape from, but couldn’t. In comedy we’ve seen this on television with shows like Northern Exposure and Green Acres. In classic cinema we’ve seen it with George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. But that’s not the kind of town we’ll be visiting soon in Wayward Pines. The obvious comparison is to that quirky Pacific Northwest town of Twin Peaks–like that cult favorite series, the protagonist is an FBI agent following up on a case in a forested town. The characters in Wayward Pines don’t appear to be as odd as the Log Lady, but we’ll learn this town is much, much darker. In fact it might have more in common with the Midwest town in Children of the Corn, the British village in Wicker Man, or Stephen King’s seaside town of Haven.

Somehow the townspeople of Wayward Pines are trapped. Like a plot pulled from an episode of sci-fi television–think The Twilight Zone’s “Nick of Time” (1960) with William Shatner, The X-Files’s episode “Arcadia” (1999), or the reboot The Twilight Zone episode “Evergreen” (2002) with Amber Tamblyn. In movies no director knows “trapped” like M. Night Shyamalan, as seen in his moody Signs (2002), The Village (2004), and The Happening (2008). So it’s no wonder his next director/executive producer project is Wayward Pines.